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The Past as Peep Show

These days, pornographers, pundits and scientists are forever pondering what women want, but in 1913, at least, it was pretty clear: They wanted “The Inside of the White Slave Traffic,” a film depicting the sexual coercion of innocents into a life of brothels, and they weren’t going to let a team of New York’s finest get in their way. When the deputy police commissioner of New York brought six officers to the Park Theater to seize the film, the 500 or so women waiting to see the 9:30 screening nearly broke into a riot, waving their green tickets and making a mad dash for the door. The scene attracted several thousand protesters who joined the cause in sympathy, a crowd that dispersed only when the police brought in reinforcements. Never was a film purporting, in its own words, to “teach a great moral lesson” so ardently embraced by a group of young women. (The producers’ argument: Learn from the mistakes of our protagonist to resist the seductive ways of that dark, handsome stranger.)

There’s a great history of racy entertainment covering itself, if scantily, in a cloak of righteous education. Kat Long describes these protective measures, or ruses, in “The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City,” less a catalog of vice than an analysis of attempts to evade its suppression. Long promises at the outset that the book will demonstrate that “the agents for good and evil, in New York especially, are symbiotic.”

When it comes to illicit media, the agents for good and evil, even outside New York, are always symbiotic: pornography, in the experience of many moral crusaders, is like an infuriating weed that loves nothing more than a good pesticide, its strength only enhanced by efforts to tamp it down. But Long also chronicles the way that initiatives to eradicate vice only helped pave the way for its further evolution in the city. Try to eliminate drinking on Sunday by limiting it to hotels, as did the Raines Law of 1896, and suddenly every bar and saloon in Manhattan is putting up cheap dividers to create makeshift accommodations, ideal breeding grounds for prostitution, which thrived in the era of the so-called Raines Law hotels. Try to provide a place where working-class men can find a bathroom that isn’t in a bar, and from that solution — public restrooms — will come another challenge: gay (semipublic) sex. Close down the Continental Baths, a glorious, early-’70s gay pick-up spot, and make way for Plato’s Retreat, a heterosexual swinger’s club in the same location in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel.

The sexual history of 20th-century New York, as written by Long, the co-author of the guidebook “Sexy New York,” has, at times, the feel of a whirlwind tour: Step up and see the sexually free flapper of the ’20s rebelling in a post-World War I rejection of staid social values; see the burlesque theaters thrilling the Depression-era man who’s down on his luck; see the pill liberate sex from reproduction. Along the way, the tour highlights some lesser-known figures in New York’s sexual history, among them its premier peep show entrepreneur, Martin Hodas, and the young women who flocked to the city as military groupies during World War II and came to be known as the khaki whackies.

Photo

An 1842 illustration from The Weekly Rake, one of New Yorks flash papers.Credit
Illustration courtesy American Antiquarian Society; From “Licentious Gotham”

In part because Long keeps the pace moving quickly, there isn’t always time for some of the detail the reader might crave, even for non-prurient reasons. Beyond the bump and grind, what exactly did the fans of burlesque see in some of the many shows that so outraged censors? And who were its stars? Why not lavish a little less space on the nitty-gritty of legal maneuverings and a little more on the actual witty, bawdy lyrics that shocked audiences in Harlem clubs in the ’20s?

In the late 19th century, peddlers were known to mislead buyers with books that promised great thrills with their titillating covers, only to hold, on the inside, puritanical tracts. Long’s “Forbidden Apple” promises a century of sex and sin, but seekers of vivid portrayals of New York’s sexual high life will have to be satisfied instead with a history that comes alive mostly in descriptions of the vain efforts to keep that high life down.

Readers trying to imagine how the city’s sexual culture might change in the new depressed economy might predict, based on the Depression-era trends that Long describes, a return to the safety of morality and religious values, a crackdown on whatever remaining illicit entertainment may linger in hidden corners of Times Square or along the West Side Highway.

But the aftershocks of the Panic of 1837 had an entirely different effect on attitudes toward sex, as described by Donna Dennis, a Rutgers law professor, in “Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York.” “By the early 1840s,” Dennis writes, “a prolonged economic depression and widespread unemployment stemming from the Panic of 1837 helped unravel the old-line elites’ monopoly on political power and usher in an age of mass party politics.” A sign of the changing times, she argues, was the rise of flash weeklies that catered to proto-Maxim rakes who were sexually brash and often mingled with the demimonde. Anti-aristocratic in spirit (and usually run by people who mixed it up with the Tammany regulars), the flash papers not only published salacious gossip about members of high society, but generated income by blackmailing the same crowd (possibly the one approach the struggling newspaper industry isn’t currently convening panels to consider).

Dennis suggests that the flash papers could have gone on publishing suggestive material indefinitely, except that they made the mistake of including in some of their transgressive tales the names of the individuals involved. Some of the powerful figures they so relished exposing started filing suit in the name of the public good. Who knows? If the papers had kept the stories sufficiently vague, they might have flourished for at least another decade before getting bollixed up in the courts. Like Long, Dennis traces the ways in which provocative material was passed off as edifying, like the guides to the city’s prostitutes that purported to steer unknowing rubes away from their clutches. And she also notes that prohibitions of one sort of racy material only led to another innovation, often more popular than the first. From closer restrictions on sexually explicit writing came the success, in the mid-19th century, of the novelist George Thompson, who combined graphically violent scenes set in urban dystopias with coy peekaboo references to sex. Thompson stopped short of describing those scenes but encouraged the reader to imagine them, while mocking the authorities for compelling him to draw the curtain.

That Long begins her book where Dennis’s ends—with the moral crusader Anthony Comstock all but eradicating the once-thriving illicit publishing industry in 19th-century New York — is a testament (if any were needed) to the irrepressibility of pornography and its less graphic predecessors. Gov. David A. Paterson recently proposed that the state, in search of new revenue, tax Internet downloads of pornography, proof that the government may have reached a new level of appreciation of New York’s porn industry — if you can’t beat it, you might as well use it to help balance the budget.

THE FORBIDDEN APPLE

A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City

By Kat Long

Illustrated. 287 pp. Ig Publishing. $18.95

LICENTIOUS GOTHAM

Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York

By Donna Dennis

Illustrated. 386 pp.Harvard University Press. $29.95

Susan Dominus writes the Big City ­column for The Times.

A version of this review appears in print on , on page BR8 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Past as Peep Show. Today's Paper|Subscribe